LIGHTZOO:Mario Martone

L'amore molesto (1995)

Mario Martone (Naples, 1959) is mostly associated with the theatre, beginning his work there in 1977.
In 1979 he founds the group "False Movement" with which he produces the highly acclaimed Tango Glaciale
(1982). He is a supporter of the foundation of "Teatri Uniti", through which he directs Rasoi, by Enzo
Moscato (1991) and Terremoto con madre e figlia, by Fabrizia Ramondino (1993) among other productions.
In 1991 he undertakes the filming of Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician. This, his first feature film,
is awarded a number of top prizes, among which is the Grand Jury Prize in Venice.

L’amore molesto (Harassing love)

review by Teresa Fiore

Memory, search, revelation, and self-discovery are at the core of
Mario Martone’s last movie before the presentation of his new film
“I vesuviani” at the Venice Biennale 1997. The director privileges
the use of the flashback to render the relentless shift between
present, recent past, and remote past. Passages between scenes
are markedly brusque and reflect the harshness of the story
represented. In the best tradition of dramatic thriller, Martone
produces suspense, and yet dispels it at every turn since the
pieces of evidence given to the spectator rarely make up a coherent
narrative. Fractures, fissures, misunderstandings, lost opportunities
characterize a story that goes beyond the thriller mode and roams
into the meanders of the psyche. Set in a noisy and car-jammed Naples
whose dissonant modern architecture mirrors the psychological conflicts
of the protagonists, the movie relies on a troubling, and yet captivating,
cacophony at various levels: people shouting, car honks, loud laughter are
the background to a complex set of events. The movie opens up with images
from the remote past, when Delia was a young girl and her mother Amalia
used to work as a seamstress while her father was a painter. At the end
of the introductory credits, Delia is caught in the act of writing,
somehow anticipating her future occupation as a cartoon designer.
No surprise then that in the next scene she is sitting at her drawing
table in Bologna, engrossed in her working, when she receives a series
of mysterious calls from her mother, whom Delia was expecting for a
visit. Amalia’s body is found dead along the shore the next day.
The event takes Delia back to Naples, the town she only marginally
belongs to by now (it is interesting to notice how her initial use
of standard Italian is gradually lost in the movie by resorting to
dialect and local expressions during her stay in town). Delia gradually
starts to gather pieces of information regarding her mother’s late
movements, and thanks to a chatty and curious neighbor and a half-reticent
rasping uncle, she realizes that her mother had a lover. The mysterious man
is an old acquaintance of the family, as a matter of fact, and Delia sets
out to find out more. Yet, the more she inquires into her mother’s life,
the more she plunges into the past, her own past, trying to make sense
of buried wounds and forgotten tensions.
The smooth surface of the present is shattered and Delia willingly,
yet cautiously, dives into the subconscious, a process that is
beautifully translated on the visual level by the use of stairs
and elevators. The shift between present and past (the childhood
days and the day of her mother’s death) is not just horizontal,
but also vertical, and the movement from different spatial levels
establishes the complex architecture of the movie. Memories are
not pleasant and often take place in dark corners, along stairs
rails, in the solitude of elevators, in the dusky recesses of
basements or in crowded public means of transportation. Movement,
vertical or horizontal, in space or in time, reigns in the movie,
yet never to create harmonious shifts, but to emphasize a sense of
growing discomfort. The transition between present and past is often
too mechanically symmetrical (from the modern bus to the old coach,
for example), but plays a functional role as a parallel to an
increasing symmetry that is established, at times forced, between Delia
and Amalia. The two women represent two conflicting characters, and
even their names signify this difference: Delia comes from Delos,
the birthplace of Artemis, hunting goddess, while Amalia means “industrious”
in Greek. Yet, the talkative and over-solicitous mother as opposed to
the reserved and determined daughter gradually start merging in the
overt parallelism of their lives (sexual intercourse with men from
the same family, hatred for an abusive father/husband, rejection of
imposed roles). This coincidence is narratively marked by Delia’s
decision to undertake her mother’s path in reverse (chronologically
speaking) and experience her “immoral” (as her affair with Caserta
is generally perceived to be) desires and temptations. Also on the
visual level, Delia’s choice to put on her mother’s dresses invests
her quest with a symbolic meaning, reaching its peak in the realization
of the twisted secret of the story while wearing Amalia’s last outfit.
This identification culminates in the closure of the movie. Similar to
her mother before dying (or rather deciding to die) Delia emanates a
sense of liberation: on the train (another parallelism) she nonchalantly
accepts a sip of beer from a stranger’s can while she graphically distorts
her mother’s image on her ID card and makes her look like herself.
Interestingly enough even the names of the two women sound alike,
the gossipy neighbor remarks their likeness, and the uncle keeps
on confusing the two names.
After all, confusion enwraps the whole movie and although the mysterious
plot is finally disentangled in a scene of powerful interpretation by an
intense Anna Bonaiuto, the linear trajectory of the plot becomes marginal
since it is the search into one’s perversions and deviations that has surfaced.
And yet, nothing is presented with a moralizing attitude or with visual voyeurism
even when the content of the scene might have given the opportunity to indulge
in it. Martone leaves room for inference, deduction, and reconstruction.
This might in fact explain some poor reviews that the movie has received,
due to its complexity, which is often seen as superfluous. Martone doesn’t
foster useless disorientation, rather presents human relationships as a web
of entangled threads whose pattern is scarcely discernible, yet nonetheless
painful, if not lacerating. Like Delia (she always wears glasses), we are
left with a blurred vision of images and events: sight can deceive, and this
movie, although cinema is a visual form of arts par excellence is able to
provide space for lack of vision where music (the soundtrack is an interesting
collage of pieces), dialect (a choice that hinders interpretation even for Italian
viewers), words from the TV in the background (Naples at the time of political
election when Mussolini’s niece was running), and elliptical forms of narrative
development “harass” a linear unraveling and comprehension of the film.
Nonetheless, the conclusion dissipates some of the gloomy fears and terrors
of the story and portrays an already determined woman, now fortified by the
discovery of her mother’s strength and volition, her rebellion against
violence and threat as organizing principles of family life, her rebuff
of moral restrictions, i.e. her search for personal freedom outside the
confines of societal regulations. A fatal choice for herself, yet one
that hasn’t gone unnoticed to the one who had the stubbornness to look
beyond blurred images, and related mysteries.